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'God' of action heroes returns to screen

Hollywood hunks gush over opportunity to star opposite the 1, the only …

Drew Zahn covers movies for WND as a contributing writer. A former pastor, he is the editor of seven books, including Movie-Based Illustrations for Preaching & Teaching, which sparked his ongoing love affair with film and his weekly WND column, "Popcorn and a (world)view." Drew currently serves as communications director for The Family Leader.

Some of Hollywood’s biggest action stars and tough guys admit all the macho jokes don’t do the legend justice: Being in the presence of Chuck Norris is a “surreal” experience.

“When you get the presence that is Chuck – you see the plane, you see him come down – you’re like, ‘Wow,'” gushed Terry Crews, the muscular actor from films like “Terminator Salvation” and “The Longest Yard.” “And then you see the SUVs and the body guards and the whole thing, and he walks out of the middle of all of it, and he’s like, ‘Hey, guys,’ – whoa. This is Chuck Norris! This is the guy who fought Bruce Lee. This is really the reason why action movies are what they are.”

Crews joined action stars Randy Couture and Dolph Lundgren for an MTV interview about their upcoming film, “Expendables 2,” which also stars Norris, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jet Li and a host of other Hollywood hunks.

Crews said being in the presence of all the action heroes, all assembled at the same time, was a “surreal moment.”

“We may not ever see this again,” Crews said. “Hopefully we all live and keep going, but you look and you go, ‘This may not ever happen [again],’ and you just have to enjoy the moment.”

Norris, who starred in films like “The Delta Force” and “Missing in Action” and the TV show “Walker Texas Ranger,” starred opposite fellow martial arts legend Bruce Lee in “The Way of the Dragon” nearly two decades before fellow “Expendables 2” co-star Liam Hemsworth was even born. Crews was a 4-year-old at the time.

From the living legend’s exploits have sprung a host of jokes and myths about his toughness, quips like, “Chuck Norris doesn’t do push-ups, he pushes the Earth down.”

“Chuck is a sweetheart,” Couture said. “His real personality doesn’t personify anything like the websites and all the jokes and all the other stuff. He’s just a very, very nice man. I knew him before we got the chance to do this film together, so it was really cool to see him on set and see him in character.”

And though he joked and admitted he was being almost “sacrilegious” in saying so, Crews claimed Norris was like a god in the action-movie universe, drawing a parallel between the action-film genre and “religion,” because “it’s about belief; it’s about what you believe in.”

“Action movies have created that,” Crews said, before delivering a line that caused the actors to erupt in laughter: “And when you see a guy like Chuck, Arnold, Sly, Bruce, all together, it’s literally like Father, Son, Holy Spirit. … Not to be sacrilegious, but in the action world, that’s what it is.”

“Expendables 2” is scheduled to explode at the box office starting Aug. 17.